Your Cool Jewish Friend Recommends: A New Hanukkah Song by (friend-of-BRM) Basya Schechter and Her (newly reconstituted!) Band Pharaoh's Daughter

I’ve been a fan of Basya Schechter for a very long time, and her episode of the Bad Rabbi podcast (How to Come Alive: Hazzanit Basya Schechter’s Journey Stories) is one of my favorite conversations, period. As that interview (and more pertinently, her musicography and life) reveals, a) Basya is a true master wanderer, and b) we all can benefit from partaking in the fruits of her intrepid quests.

I originally discovered Basya through her band Pharaoh’s Daughter, one of the aughts-era template-setters of successful Jewish fusion in a catchy world-music register: inspired ethno-melodic crate-digging based on Basya’s raw openhearted physical, spiritual, and musical wanderings among obscure indigenous Jewish traditions of Eastern European and Mizrahi culture, executed upon her return by a kindred band of Brooklyn virtuosos.

Basya took a significant hiatus from Pharaoh’s Daughter to open a chapter of collective musical-spiritual leadership at the Romemu Congregation in New York (the name of her role evolved as her role evolved, and I don’t want to get it wrong, but at one point she was Romemu’s Musical Director, and at the time of our interview she went by the title Hazzanit). We talked a lot about that important work in the podcast ep.

Recently, Basya has shifted some of her focus back into making original music — and, very excitingly, gotten the band back together!

Here is a recent performance of Basya’s original arrangement of the Hanukkah blessing “Al ha-Nissim” (“On account of the miracles…”), performed with (as?) Pharaoh’s Daughter. The blessing itself is a recognition of miracles done then and now, “in those days, and in this moment.” Implicit in the expression of gratitude for past acts of manifest supernatural salvation is a steep but subtle challenge: a call to bring that same vivid recognition of ineffable connection and care, that same authentic overflow of gratitude, to the events that are transpiring in our own time, in front of our own eyes, moment after moment.

This is a taller order — the very difficult yet necessary clarity, perhaps, that the Hanukkah light itself is meant to help us achieve.

On cue, the band captures this tension with its signature double-edged swoon of plaintive vocal harmonies mingled with haunting ambient keys and strings, set against an infectious rhythm section and enchantingly uplifting recorder marching you forward towards the memory of a better time…in short, I can happily report that Pharaoh’s Daughter is undiminished and in full effect.

Happy 8th Light! You are all dancing-flame miracles to me…